Home Ec Coffee Cake

Back in middle school, I took a mandatory class called “Careers.” This name was my school’s attempt to put a modern spin on what was really home economics, but honestly I really liked the class. It had a cooking portion and while today I look back and wonder why our omelet recipe had 4 eggs in it, I will always be thankful for the coffee cake recipe that resulted.The cake became a favorite in my house and I found myself making it over and over.

Then I moved out and just stopped. I did make coffee cake from a different recipe a few times when I was living alone in Pennsylvania, but even that I just stopped making.

Then suddenly, last week, I found myself needing that original coffee cake. So much crumbly brown sugar, moist cake, so good. I looked all through my recipes and couldn’t find it, but luckily my mom had saved a copy of her own.

It’s not like cookie dough, where you cream butter and sugar and gradually mix in the dry ingredients. With this, you start off by combining all of the dry ingredients in one bowl, all of the wet ingredients in another bowl, and then pouring the wet stuff into a well in the dry stuff. My teacher showed us how.

So, start off with flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder. When I was making this, I was absolutely astounded at the amount of salt and baking soda that this recipe called for. Two and a half teaspoons. TWO AND A HALF. This isn’t soup! Was it a typo? Emailed mom, she said that she wasn’t sure but that it had been written this way since she’d had the recipe, and it had probably been about 15 years now. Okay, then, 2 1/2 tsp each of salt and baking powder. Wow.

Make a well in the dry ingredients. Realize you have no idea how to take a good, non-flash picture of the white contents of a white bowl without it being too dark. Try to put it in sunlight and realize that that won’t help.

Next, your wet ingredients. Milk, oil, and egg. No surprises there.

Beat the mixture

Pour the wet mixture into the well of dry ingredients.

Fold in the sides and beat until just moist. The recipe didn’t say that, but I pretty much assumed that it’s like muffin recipes that don’t turn out well if you overmix them.

Finally, put your topping ingredients together. Brown sugar, ground cinnamon, butter, and pecans. I never used to put pecans in it because, well let’s face it, I was a kid and kids don’t include nuts on purpose. But it looked like a pretty good idea this time around.

Use a pastry blender to mix it all up. I never used to have one of these so I always used a butter knife. This is much better.

So good. This is really the best part, you know.

Finally, time to put it in the pan. The first layer is half the batter…

Followed by half the streusel topping…

Followed by the rest of the batter…

Followed by the rest of the topping.

Pop it in the oven, and then it’ll look something like this.

Luscious.

First few bites tasted salty to me, but then again I wasn’t hungry.

Way later in the day, I was super hungry. Grabbed another piece and it tasted amazing.

And it passed the husband test. He loved it.

So good. Make it.
(But use less salt)

Recipe in the tastebook shortly.

Perfect dinner!

Okay, this isn’t a real post, the kind with pictures and a new recipe and step-by-step playback of my kitchen experiment. Consider this more of a follow-up.

Remember this dish? That creamy tomato-based dish with Italian sausage and rotini pasta that I was so proud of inventing?

I made it again, and I made some key tweaks:

1. I remembered the cream cheese this time, and I added about twice as much as I normally do. I guess I was making up for that day I forgot it. Also, I was hungry.

2. I diced and included an extra fresh tomato that I had sitting on my counter. Seemed silly to use canned diced tomato and ignore the fresh one entirely, but I didn’t want to skip out on the canned stuff either.

3. I included 2 leftover meatballs and some sauce from Meem's spaghetti and meatballs. Just sliced up the meatballs and dropped them in the sauce with everything else. I didn’t even slice them up correctly because I didn’t want to get my cutting board all saucy – I just stuck a butter knife into the gladware container that the meatballs were in and did my cutting freestyle.

4. Less cheese on top, mainly because the cheese I had smelled a little funky. I used a few shakes of Parmesan instead, and that actually turned out really nice.

5. Didn’t put foil over it to bake.

Hubby loved it. Very much. So much that he thinks I should make meatballs to put in this dish each time I make it now. And he serenaded me with a loud burp, which of course means “Compliments to the chef.” Compliments accepted.

Now go out and made this!

Taco Casserole

What do you do when you want to make something Mexican-themed for dinner but you don’t have tortillas or tortilla chips? Can’t make nachos or burritos or enchiladas. That’s pretty much all I know how to make. And I wasn’t about to look up a recipe for making tortillas – if I’m too lazy to go to the grocery store 1.5 miles away, I’m also too lazy for that. But hubby really, really wanted Mexican food.

Solution: taco casserole. I know this sounds weird. Roll with it.

Well, the recipe was actually called taco bake, but there were a lot of similar recipes called taco casserole and that’s more descriptive for me. I chose this one because I had the ingredients, mainly.

Also, it looked simple enough. Sauté ground beef and chopped onion.

Get some taco seasoning ready. If you don’t have any, make your own.

When the beef is done, drain it and then add water and tomato sauce. I also added diced tomatoes, and instead of canned tomato sauce, I used leftover sauce from the other night.

Also add your taco seasoning. This is important!

Stir it up and then cover and let simmer for a while. While it’s simmering, cook some pasta.

And grate some cheddar cheese.

Mmm, the sauce is looking and smelling good.

Stir in the pasta, cheese, and also a can of chopped green chilies.

Pour it all into a greased 9x13 pan.

Top with cheese and toss it in a 400 degree oven.

[I accidentally typed “400 degree onion” and then sat there staring at it, trying to figure out why that didn’t look right. Got it now'!]

And when it comes out, it’s hot and bubbly and delicious.

My pictures make it look more yellow than it really was.

Nor do they capture how delicious this was. Really. It tasted nothing like your traditional baked pasta dishes because of the addition of the taco seasoning. It tasted like a baked taco with pasta in place of the tortilla.

And the leftovers are so, so satisfying.

Make it, and enjoy it.

Best part: dishes were done before it was even finished cooking. Cleanup was a snap!

Meem’s Spaghetti and Meatballs

Hubby grew up in an Italian family. His grandmother was from Sicily and a fantastic cook. He’s got memories of sneaking into the kitchen as a kid to swipe a meatball from the pot, and so I tried to reproduce it a while back. Of course, the recipe was only written down later by his mother, so it left a few questions unanswered, but it turned out well. But then I put the recipe aside and forgot about it.

Fast forward a year. We started going to a family-style Italian restaurant in our neighborhood, and their spaghetti and meatballs is out of this world.

It made me want more. So I made more. I made a few shortcuts, though, since I didn’t go to the store after deciding to make these.

First step: the meatballs. Combine breadcrumbs and grated romano cheese. Or in my case, combine breadcrumbs with grated parmesan cheese.

Add in milk, eggs, salt, pepper, minced onion, minced celery, and minced garlic. Or…. in my case, instead of celery, use celery salt and cut back on the regular salt, since I didn’t have celery.

Finally, add ground beef, shape into balls, and “cook.” The recipe didn’t specify how. I did some googling and learned that frying them in a pan is more authentic, but baking them is healthier and easier. I went with baking, though it did give them each one flat side. I think next time, I’ll fry them on the stove.

They came out looking like this. They seemed to be oozing a bit of cheese and fat, but they sure smelled good.

And now for the sauce!

Start off with a little olive oil, a can of tomato sauce and three cans of tomato paste.

Just sauté it for 20-30 minutes, stirring very frequently because it sticks and scorches if you don’t.

Then add minced onion, celery, and garlic. Again, I didn’t have celery, but I did add onion and garlic.

Cook it for another 10ish minutes, or until the veggies are soft. It’s getting pretty thick by this point.

Measure out the following: oregano, basil, salt, black pepper, sugar, and a bay leaf. The oregano and basil would have been better fresh, but you make due with what you have!

Add it to the tomato sauce, along with 6 cups of water.

Also add the meatballs, and then let it simmer (covered) for an hour, stirring every now and then.

At this point, I realized that what I *thought* was a fully box of spaghetti was really more like a quarter box of spaghetti. So I cooked fettucini instead. I guess it all tastes the same.

It was yummy! I think I may add less water next time, as the sauce seemed thin at the end, but it was good. I think if I had followed the instructions exactly and also fried the meatballs, it would have been especially amazing.

But it was worth the effort. We both ate too much.

Andouille and Chicken Creole Pasta

Sometimes I like to try to find recipes that venture into Cajun flair, since hubby grew up eating Cajun food. I’ve been told it’s impossible to make “real” Cajun food outside of the area, since you can’t get “real” sausage or other essential ingredients, but I thought this recipe would be a good compromise because it has ingredients I can get in Maryland.

I made it once, about a year and a half ago. At the time, I had cut way back on the spice in the recipe, since the reviews all said that 3 tablespoons of creole seasoning is far too much, but even so it was too spicy to enjoy and all the effort was wasted. I had Andouille in the fridge, so I thought I’d try again, cutting back even more.

My ingredients weren’t exactly fresh. Here are some frozen chicken breasts and some frozen green and red bell peppers, which I had cut into strips prior to freezing.

I thawed out the chicken enough to cut it up, and then also sliced up a package of Andouille sausage links. If they look a little funny around the edges, it’s because I’d opened the package a few days earlier for another recipe and didn’t seal it up properly. Oops.

Sautéed the sausage and chicken with a bunch of creole seasoning until they were about halfway cooked. The recipe called for 3 tablespoons of the seasoning. Last time, I used 2 and it was far too much. This time, I think I started with about a 1/2 tablespoon and added more as I went.

Added in the peppers. Should have added fresh mushrooms, but I didn’t have any. And I forgot that I had a can of sliced mushrooms in the cupboard, but those are never as good as fresh anyway.

When the veggies have cooked and become tender, stir in some chicken broth

And milk (I used skim)

I poured them together to give me something to do while I was waiting to dump them in… I don’t think this is necessary!

Also, measure out some garlic powder and lemon pepper seasoning to add to the mixture.

Nom nom nom… it’s starting to look and smell delicious.

However, it’s extremely liquidy. The recipe calls for a 1/4 cup of corn starch dissolved in 1/2 cup cold water. I never use that much when I thicken my sauces, but then again this was a LOT of liquid so I figured I didn’t have a choice.

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And then just simmer for a while, letting the whole thing thicken up.

I thought about serving this with rice, since the linguini it calls for seemed odd, but I asked hubby which he’d prefer and he said linguini. Linguini it is.

It did turn out well. Hubby liked it a lot better this time, since the heat wasn’t overpowering to the point where we couldn’t even taste anything. Personally, I thought it tasted corn-starchy. I think it’d make more sense to add less liquid – maybe half the chicken broth and half the milk – and then you wouldn’t have to work so hard to thicken it up. Of course, you could also use cream in place of milk and then use even less, but that’d be a lot more fattening.

But it was good, even the leftovers. A nice, flavorful change up from the usual red sauce.